Bankrolling the Belgrade Bandits? NGOs and Foreign Aid Localization in Serbia

• In Event: Shape Shifters: The Influence of Civil Society on Public Policy

Abstract

Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) have taken a beating lately. Long hailed as part and parcel of a vibrant civil society and well positioned to promote social justice, economic development, and democracy, NGOs have more recently been accused of being co-opted by international donors. Eager to secure funding and access to policy makers, NGOs have aligned themselves with funders and embraced the bureaucratic management practices and international discourses necessary to appease their patrons. This has led scholars to decry NGOs as depoliticized organizations that are disconnected from the people they claim to represent. Has the rise of NGOs thus led to the fall of civil society?

No. The local NGOs that receive the bulk of foreign aid—that is, NGOs that are headquartered in the countries where they operate and that conduct their activities in that same country—are not puppets of international donors. Instead, they find creative ways to navigate the foreign aid bureaucracy while remaining faithful to local communities. In this paper I analyze how Serbian NGOs conduct this delicate dance of meeting donors’ bureaucratic requirements while responding to, advocating for, and financially supporting local communities.

Decades of academic literature framed NGOs as the essence of civil society (de Tocqueville, 1835; Fukuyama, 2001; Putnam, 1993, 2000). Celebrated for their roles in creating spaces for civic engagement and holding governments accountable to citizens, NGOs were seen as engines of citizen empowerment. As NGOs emerged throughout the Global South, the hope was that their proliferation would strengthen local civil society as a realm of economic development, democracy building, and pluralism.

But recent studies of NGO expansion throughout the developing world suggest that the “associational revolution” has not turned out as hoped (Banks et al., 2015; Krause, 2014; Stroup & Wong, 2017; Teets, 2014). The notion that NGOs will act as independent agents of activism, citizen empowerment, and social change assumes that they arise from, and operate according to the mandates of, the grassroots. Scholars have shown that aid-driven NGO sectors are instead marked by professional, bureaucratic institutions that implement donor priorities rather that serve as champions of citizens’ interests.

Drawing upon 10 months of ethnographic research in Serbia, I argue that such professionalization does characterize Serbia’s NGO sector. The paper shows how international donors’ grant making practices—including application, reporting, and evaluation requirements for short-term projects—shape the forms and functions of individual organizations and construct a lucrative NGO industry. But the paper also takes the reader to hyper-local, grassroots organizations in villages far afield from Belgrade—the types of Tocquevillian associations extolled in the literature as the essence of civil society—whose staff stress the critical role support from the “Belgrade Bandits” plays in their work by fighting for national policy reforms and linking their organizations to international donors.

Aid-funded NGO staff are the first to admit that their organizations are not community-led. They see their organizations’ roles as reforming the national policies, issuing sub-grants to grassroots groups, and linking donors to communities. Literature that critiques professional NGO for failing to have characteristics of grassroots, community-based organizations, therefore, is misguided. Instead, aid-funded NGOs are better understood as bridges between the international community and local citizens. The so-called “Belgrade Bandits” are not bandits at all. Rather, they are mission-oriented, activist-led organizations that use foreign aid to try to improve the policy environments and funding flows that affect Serbian civil society—an endeavor that is ambitious, complicated, and decidedly human.

Banks, N., Hulme, D., & Edwards, M. (2015). NGOs, States, and Donors Revisited: Still Too Close for Comfort? World Development, 66, 707–718.
de Tocqueville, A. (1835). Democracy in American and Two Essays on America. Penguin Books.
Fukuyama, F. (2001). Social Capital, Civil Society and Development. Third World Quarterly, 22(1), 7–20.
Krause, M. (2014). The good project: Humanitarian relief NGOs and the fragmentation of reason. University of Chicago Press.
Putnam, R. D. (1993). Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton University Press.
Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster.
Stroup, S. S., & Wong, W. H. (2017). The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs. Cornell University Press.
Teets, J. C. (2014). Civil Society under Authoritarianism: The China Model. Cambridge University Press.

Author

• Catherine E. Herrold, Syracuse University